Mental Origins of Strategy: Essays on the Impact of Managerial Cognition on Firm Strategic Renewal

Organizations are essentially comprised of people. Although structures, routines and practices account for a large variation in firm performance, human factors play a significant role in defining organizational trajectories. The concept of dynamic managerial capabilities and its applications in studying strategic change in organizations focuses on these human factors. Being an emergent approach to understating organizations, the dynamic managerial capabilities approach has immense possibilities. According to Helfat and Martin (2015), dynamic managerial capabilities focus on the study of managerial impact on strategic change. Their recent review of the field points out that the managerial impact in organizations is brought about by three underlying resources; Managerial Cognition, Managerial Social Capital and Managerial Human Capital. These three aspects cover a broad range of factors such as mental models and processes, emotions, social network ties and characteristics, relationships, educational qualifications and so on. The diversity in these managerial capabilities are conceptualized to be directly linked to diverse firm outcomes under conditions of change.

Focusing on managerial cognition this doctoral research project includes the following four studies. Firstly, a study of the moderating effect of TMT structural interdependence on the relationship between TMT characteristics and Business model innovation is done on a sample of North American publishing firms. The second study takes a different approach towards measuring managerial cognition by using CEO political ideology and studies its impact on TMT structures. The third study seeks to investigate the interaction between top and middle management by focusing on shared mental models and their impact on middle managers’ motivation. Lastly, a historical analysis of Business Model Innovation in specific context and settings is proposed to study the impact of managerial cognition on dynamic high-technology industries.